Just about every CMS product I've seen, other than very specialized products such as Wordpress and Mediawiki, has serious problems.

I don't think PHP needs to be "more like Java." PHP's lack of persistence means that PHP applications are more reliable and scalable than Java applications via a "shared-nothing" approach.

For instance, many Java webapps require constant reboots of the Tomcat application server. This doesn't happen with PHP. Period.

A PHP bytecode cache mitigates many of the problems involved with reparsing complicated apps.